Why is it only 24 hours in a day? I would need at least 12 more hours to per day. I would use those extra hours to work-out (New Year’s resolution) be with my friends and take care of my girlfriend. A couple month ago I remembered I read about a man in Sweden that only sleep for 2.5 hours, he took micro breaks for 25 min every fourth hour.
Since I got back from my vacation I’ve had a lot to do, both at home and at work. At home we are finally getting settled in the new apartment and we only have a few more paintings to put up on the wall and after that we will have a welcome party for all our friends. At work it’s been a lot of focus on key metrics and measurable values that we can benchmark over time. It’s always important to keep a look at the competitors and what they do. And for me that means keep an eye on their newly added review sources and partners on each market.
In the beginning of each new year we set goals that should be achieved by the end of the year. One of my goals this year is to launch another 16 markets for Testfreaks. And today we welcome Testfreaks Denmark to the family. A couple of other markets is also in the pipeline, but I will get back on that later.
One good effect with the financial crise is that the amount of programmers and freelancers outside of Sweden have increased and it’s much easier to find good workers. However it’s still seems to be very difficult to find programmers in Sweden that will join the Testfreaks staff. On our swedish site we have a couple of different jobs listed, take a look here. Work at Testfreaks (sorry about the swedish). Mainly we are looking for people with knowledge in Ruby and that wants to work with Ruby on Rails.
This Monday when I returned to the office after a well needed three weeks vacations in Thailand I had over 400 unread mails in my mailboxes (yes I have more then one). So basically the first day of the week was spent reading through old mails. 50% was spam or people trying to sell SEO, SEM or PR services. About 20% was mails where I was just put on cc. So over 70% of the mails I read was more or less a waist of time.
Tuesday was bank holiday here in Sweden.
After that I’ve been debriefed by our team leader for operations of what have happened during my time away and what’s the status of certain important projects are. Since the new year started when I was away I spent a couple of hours in Excel making really good looking graphs over last years performance.
By the end of the 2008 we had launched Testfreaks on 24 markets. All though 5 of them was launched on the 28th of December. In 2009 we will launch another 16 markets bringing the total to 40 sites by the end of 2009. All of this will demand very hard work and long hours. Our team will most certainly grow in order to make this possible. We have started to focus a lot more on the quality and will set up measurable targets for the quality of the sites.
If you look at our US site we know have over 100 categories, and we continue launching new ones. We’re adding new review sources every week, but we’re finding it harder and harder to find new sites that keep the good quality. Many of our competitors don’t care about the quality of the review site they add to their site. Therefore it sometimes seems as they have as many sites as we do or more, but there are a lot of sites that we don’t list on Testfreaks, sites that are made just to make money from adsense or other affiliates. We want the sites we recommend for our users to have high quality and really give the user what he/she is looking for when they do their product research.
Anyway, to sum this up. I’ve had three weeks vacation and haven’t feelt this eager to work hard in a long time. 2009 will be the year when everyone on the Internet will learn to know about Testfreaks and how good we are. Our tech team is constantly adding new features to our sites and hopefully you will like them.We are also looking for more programmers, please check out this link. Work at Testfreaks. Sorry about the swedish… if your not speaking english send us a mail and we will help you from there.
I just love internet and the fact that people are willing to help each other when one is in need of some expert help.
I’m a regular user of GAF where you can buy pratically any service in the world. I found a funny project about a man from sweden that needs help with his math course. It’s basically high school math, algebra and stuff like that. He’s willing to pay up to 150 USD per month if the person solves his problem (homework) every friday.
I guess the school wouldn’t like this if they knew about it, the fun part is that they probably never will know about it. But for you that want to know about the cheating person, you can read more here.
He includes examples of the homework he need help with. Math1 (It’s in swedish) Math2 (It’s in swedish)
I can’t get enough of this nice music service, so today I installed Wine for Ubuntu in order to run Spotify on my Linux laptop as well. I also installed some new speakers for my computer, Lacie’s new USB speakers.
The speakers really look good on my white desk and the sounds is great. I tried to install them on my girlfriends computer as well but I didn’t manage, Windows got some kind of conflict with the USB port… Crap XP.
Does anyone have a good party playlist for Spotify? If so give me a comment about it so I can add it.
I’ve been using the music streaming service Spotify for a while now, I wrote about it last summer when we tested the service at our office. Or actually it’s my girlfriend that’s been using it the most, since I haven’t gotten it to work on my Linux system. I know it suppose to work under Wine, and I haven’t added that much time to fix it since Linda play the music from here Windows machine instead.
Spotify is the shit when it comes to stream music, but for people like me that don’t know that much music I’ve used recommending engines on Last.fm and latelly in iTunes to find good music. But it hasn’t been satisfying because I don’t really know that many songs or artists.
Today I found a great service, Listiply, that fans of Spotify can use to share their playlists. When I looked around I found another service (Spotify friends) for it as well, but that one wasn’t as great as the first. Don’t know why, I guess it’s a mather of design that I like. The two services ofter the same functionality. So now I can continue to listen to great music without learning the actual songs or artists name. (I can focus on other things in my head)
As I’ve previoused written I have a large team siting all around the globe working close together with me and the other in the team. At present there are 23 people to make sure the perform at the very best all time. And that’s not easy, but it’s easier now when they know eachother and the fact that I can benchmark them and send reports each week that shows there performance over the last couple of weeks.
I can then use this benchmark when we are negotiating contracts and fees, since I’m always paying for performance this kind of measuring numbers are important. I’m working on more keyfigures that can be used to measure the work they do.
Another thing that was and still sometimes is a problem for me is how you demo a new function in the system. I mostly use Skype, Msn, Yahoo IM, Gtalk and other instant messenger clients to chat with my personal. But sometimes you need to show them a demo as well, and I’ve been experimenting with shared desktops, video tutorials, text tutorials with images but still I haven’t found the best way.
What I’ve noticed is that programmers often tend to learn faster with text and images, and for other services we can use shared desktops. But I also have people working from places where 0.5 Mbps are considered high speed internet. For those people I’ve been unable to use shared desktop, so we have tried with video tutorials. All these different kinds of system take a lot of time, not to mention the fact that we are constantly changing things in our systems.
From the beginning I was uncertain that I could trust all the people in the team, I therefore didn’t not share contacts with them. I was the only person that had contact with the rest, but as some of them have worked with me for two years I now have no problem giving them access and the possibility to talk to each other. There’s a lot to win on this. Instead of them asking me things, they start by asking the other people in the team. And if they can’t solve it together they ask me.
All this sounds great, but I can still sometimes have the to much of there work are depending on me. We have therefore decided to hire a new person that will report to me and handle a lot of this work. I will be working more strategic. This will be great and it will also make it much easier to scale the team.
There was a time when people thought Google was the solution for the Microsoft problem… Now I’m not so sure anymore. With the new browser Chrome, Google have soon assemled an entire operating system. They have there own browser, mail, spreedsheet. Will the next thing from Google be a OS?
Google also have there Android plattform for mobile phones, and the first phone is on it’s way out to the market. Would this plattform also work as an OS for computers? One thing is sure with all these data and usage of Google products they practically know everything about you.
Yesterday I first heard news about the new Google browser called Chrome. This morning I downloaded it for testing and after about one hour of testing I’m convinced, I will no longer need Firefox. The only problem so far is that I have a lot of great plugins for Firefox, and I hope these will show up for Chrome as soon as possible.Â
The first thing I noticed is speed, both in rendering webpages and in handling the browser. Sites that normally is slow, is much faster in the new browser. And sites that alreday are super fast is even more faster. I also tested some secure locations, and there’s no problem with any thing.Â
It seems that Chrome will be a big threath against Mozillas Firefox that for long have been an outstanding and great choose if you don’t want to use Microsofts browser. And I guess that the link Google have put on there first page, will give them a lot of new users of Chrome since people get it servered on a plate rather then have to seek for it.Â
Perhaps this it’s time to buy Google stocks once again. Because Google is really everywhere, and will probably continue to dominate the web for years to come.
I’ve been testing the Magento plattform for a while and I must say it’s good – but complicated. I don’t find there menu very logical. But the system is great for an e-commerce entreprenur that can have one CMS for several stores.
I’ve tried to modified the layout of the store and it’s both easy and not easy. If you know your CSS you can basically have one design for each product page. But that also makes it difficult. I find if very hard to make a good overall design, but then again I’m no designer.
Unfortently I don’t have that much time at nights to work on these small projects but I will give you a more detailed report furter on.
Hi, don’t know how many of you that listen to this podcast, TWIT (This week in tech). I’ve followed the podcast for more then 18 month, and I can only say – it’s the best! It gives you a great view of what’s happening in the techworld online.
Sure I follow a lot of others blogs on the subjects as well, but I think Leo Laporte have a long history online and he seems to be very updated on what happends online. The site twit.tv also have live broadcasting with webcam shows for about 40h /week.
I can’t get enough of this nice music service, so today I installed Wine for Ubuntu in order to run 
